Leading students through "Reading Art Through Poetry" will help them to not only explore and experiment with ecphrastic poetry, but to discover much more the poetry and artwork of an extremely important era in our country's history––the Harlem Renaissance. Beginning with the exploration of Harlem itself, the unit will give students background with examples of what was happening in Harlem in the early twentieth Century in the arts, literature and music. Students will find inspiration to write their own ecphrastic pieces by studying the works of poets Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks as well as great artists such as Jacob Lawrence, William H. Johnson and Romare Bearden. Finally the inspiration gathered through the study of art and poetry of the Harlem Renaissance will lead to the students' creation of books of ecphrastic poetry
Artwork has always been a source of inspiration for poets and students alike. From Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn" or Browning's fictional examination of art in "My Last Duchess," to Dante Gabriel Rossetti's "Prosperpine" and Allen Ginsberg's "The Corn Harvester," art has often served as an inspiration for the written word and a vehicle often leading to the creation of great poetry born of artistic inspiration.
Working in an arts magnet school, my students are surrounded by an abundance of material to look to for poetic inspiration. Our school, like most schools, is decorated throughout with artwork, both professionally and student created. What is different about our middle school as opposed to others is the degree to which our students are exposed to art. In our arts magnet school students are inundated with and introduced to art in all of their subjects; dancers dance to music, to visual arts, and to poetry; photographers not only photograph the arts throughout the building, but they create it as well; and English and other academic classes regularly attempt to bridge the gap between the written word and art. The value and importance of art is highly respected in our school and every unit which I create for my students attempts to wed the arts and the written word.
Students are fortunate to become a part of the arts community through an arts magnet school. Every year my school presents a large art show called "As Far as the Eye Can See," in which incredible sculpture, visual arts, video, photography and other art forms are highlighted in a forum that includes an exclusive opening in which our strings orchestra greets local dignitaries who choose to attend. Our school regularly sets up exhibits in public areas throughout the city, including the town hall, the board of education building, local museums, the train station and even the New Haven Green. Field trips to area museums and galleries are a regular occurrence with students visiting the Yale Art Gallery, The Yale Center for British Art, smaller local galleries as well as larger facilities outside of our city including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art in New York. Students at our school are taught early that arts are and should be a part of their lives both in and outside the classroom setting.
Not unlike the function of an arts magnet school, this study of ecphrastic poetry will attempt to wed, or merge the more standard academic pursuits (the study of poetry, the writing process) with the arts. Students will learn how to view art, to write poetry, and to merge the two. The focus or the tools that I will use to get us there will be the art and poetry of the Harlem Renaissance. This pivotal period of American culture is rich with materials that will allow me to lead students through a process that begins with the understanding of how to view art, how to appreciate poetry and, finally, how to merge their new appreciation of art and poetry in their own ecphrastic books––including not only poems about the art of the Harlem Renaissance, but about the art and paintings that surround them in their own environment every day.
Purpose
This unit is designed in a multiple tiered fashion meant to help students find their way from the observation of art to the creation of their own art in response to the art which they have been observing. At the beginning of the unit students learn how to be better observers of art. A teacher bringing a class of students into an art museum without preparing them for the experience is destined to see that modern students need a lesson or two in the art of observing art, the technique needed to be successful in their attempts to become better readers of art. During this part of the unit I will introduce the reader to a method of observation introduced to teachers at my school several years ago by instructors from the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
The second section of my unit focuses on the study of poetry. Here I will introduce several key approaches to the writing of poetry that will help students to become better writers and to improve on the poetry that they currently write. The importance of incorporating sensory images in the writing of poetry will be explored as will the concept of "voice" in poetry and the importance of determining the ending of lines and punctuation in the writing of free verse.
Focusing on the paintings and poetry of the Harlem Renaissance will give my students a glimpse into an incredible period of the development of African American culture. Many students come to the eighth grade with little or no knowledge of what the Harlem Renaissance was, and the impact of the movement on the development of the arts in the twentieth century is inarguably an important one that they should not miss. I believe that eighth grade students should not leave middle school without some knowledge of what went on in this country in Harlem in the beginning of the Twentieth Century.
The merging of art and poetry is really what an arts magnet school is all about and what educators of middle school students should be pursuing. Visual arts, in fact all arts, are always a key to academic success on the middle school level. Any teacher can tell you that there is a huge difference in any lesson when a visual or object of some sort is introduced to the lesson. The fourth section of my unit unites the poetry and artwork in examples that students will utilize in the writing of their own poetry based on artwork, seeking to capitalize on the lessons they have learned in the previous sections, giving them a chance to read art through poetry. In this section students will write their own poetry and refine their poetry writing through the writer workshop method of multiple draft writing.
I want my students to become better creative writers and I want them to become creative artists. This is why I include the final section of the unit. As mentioned earlier, I am a firm believer that the arts are a vital part of the education of all students and I strive to include art in most of the units that I create. The culminating activity of this unit, the creation of poetry books, not only serves as a means of alternate assessment, but is an open–ended, creative project in which students will be able to display their own artistic abilities based on their own choices.
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